At the Mountains of Madness: A primer on Writing
summary
Argues that writing a language teaches deeper design and validation and recommends prototyping in Ruby then porting later, citing Dagon language as a concrete result and a working BF interpreter implemented to prove completeness. Uses Ragel and Racc for lexing and parsing, confronts real issues like a persistent shift-reduce conflict and an 11,000 line parser file, and shows a production use case that reduces a giant real estate form into a single search box cutting a ten minute task to 10 minutes to 10 seconds.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:00Use Ruby
- 5:10Lexing
- 5:45Parsing
- 6:35Evaluation
- 7:20Raggle
- 8:30Rack
- 8:50C Libraries
- 9:15Ragga
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